The Failure of Marvel Eternals: Who Is To Blame?
- Zebediah Oke
- Dec 14, 2021
- 6 min read
Updated: Dec 23, 2021
Marvel Eternals had an ensemble cast of veteran, heavyweights and refreshing new actors alike, a socially diverse appeal, a generous Marvel budget and an Oscar-winning director with the creative freedom to wield it. Still, the film has swiftly become one of the most polarising films in the MCU’s catalogue. How did one of the most anticipated films of the year become what so many have dubbed, “a failure”?
The first nails
Before Chloe Zhao’s past comments about her upbringing have affected who gets to see the film and where. Eternals is yet to be released in China and, as it features Marvel’s first openly gay characters on the silver screen, it’s also banned in countries of the Middle East (Qatar, Kuwait and Saudi Arabia). All of these factors have hurt the overall viewership of Eternals before it was even released.
Critical reception
Promptly after its release, negative reviews poured in from movie critics and, as of writing this, it has the lowest metacritic metascore (52) and tomatometer rating of any Marvel Cinematic Universe movie with over 190 ‘rotten’ reviews bringing its score to 48%. Interestingly, Eternals has a 78% audience rating, exceeding The Incredible Hulk (70%), Iron Man 2 (71%), Thor: Dark World (75%), and Thor (76%) respectively.
It is important to note that the more longstanding MCU titles have amassed hundreds of thousands of ratings, whilst Eternals only has tens of thousands. Less people have seen Eternals compared to the older films but those who have, have typically rated it well.
Eternals displays disparity in appraisal between critics and moviegoers and this isn’t an isolated incident for Rotten Tomatoes (looking at you Ad Astra). On IMDB, which has a user rating system more calibrated to cinephiles than critics, it currently has a 6.8 rating, outperforming The Incredible Hulk (6.6) and Black Widow (6.7) tying with Captain Marvel and Thor: Dark World.
Analysing internet ratings is not a perfect science for quantifying audience’s enjoyment nor can it account for the metastatic growth of opinion through social media. Personally, one of the reasons I skipped watching Eternals on its opening week was due to seeing one too many negative reviews. When I finally did watch it, I was surprised at the hyperbole of the reviews I’d seen headlines for, and it made me wonder how many others skipped watching opening weekend–and how that impacted the film financially.
Box Office
The highest grossing film of the last two years is a Chinese war film called The Battle at Lake Changjin. It made $896m. No film in 2020 or 2021 has passed the $1 billion dollar mark globally–not even No Time to Die, which has petered out at $763m. For this reason, it’s almost futile to measure box office success against pre-pandemic standards. The last 2 years of intermittent quarantines have sorely impacted box office sales across the board whilst bolstering new opportunities for streaming. I'm certain that Spiderman: No Way Home will be the first film of the pandemic era to make $1b dollars and were these pre-COVID circumstances, I wouldn’t have been surprised if it outperformed Avengers ($1.5b). Adjusting examinations of global box office statistics with a pandemic-era lens, how much has Eternals made in comparison to other films?
Shang Chi and the Ten Rings has been Marvel's most fiscally successful film of 2020 and 2021, making $431m up to this point. But the strategy to release early in the year hindered its box office sales and the film’s acclaim wasn’t enough to overcome the COVID anxiety (or country-by-country restrictions) of cinema-goers because, by October, these factors had dispelled enough for Shang Chi to be surpassed by Venom: Let There Be Carnage with $483m.
Eternals hasn’t earned as much as Shang Chi, however it’s made a respectable amount of money for a pandemic-era movie ($384m) and it outperformed its direct "competitor" Dune ($382m). It is currently 9th in the worldwide box office earnings of 2021. We could, if we were being pedantic, split hairs over the fact that Dune's budget ($165m) was $35 million less than Eternals ($200m). Nevertheless, both these films made a return on their investment.
But box office sales aren’t the judge, jury and executioner of a great film, nor should “breaking even” be a measure of success. The Suicide Squad had a budget of $185m and it only made $167m globally at the box office. Yet, The Suicide Squad is arguably one of the best films of the year.
Perspective
Eternals is a visually luscious work of art whose only crime comes from an ambition of scale. Dane Whitman (Kit Harrington) is introduced at the advent of the film as a love interest only to be absent for the majority of it, whilst the primary Deviant is neglected narratively despite their harrowing ascension into sentience and being a tragedy of the same, Celestial puppetry as the eponymous heroes. There’s a lot going on and it makes certain arcs suffer.
These gripes pale in comparison to the film’s strengths–some of the most gorgeous cinematography I’ve seen in a Marvel film, the familial familiarity of the humour, an uncompromising exploration of cosmic-sized moralities, a well-balance traversion of time, rivetingly choreographed fight scenes and an artistically refreshing composition of CGI.
The “failure” of Eternals has little to do with how good or bad the film is perceived to be, and the amount of people who’ve seen it (or paid to see it) is not indicative of its excellence. Red Notice is Netflix’s most watched film of all time and it involves The Rock pouring a can of coke on a fake, 3D-printed faberge egg until it disintegrates (is the lesson there that The Rock is smart or that we shouldn’t be drinking coke?).
What Eternals suffered from is a cultural failure, one formed in a maelstrom of unluckiness and bad faith, and one that revealed an intolerance for deviating from the norm.
How often do we hear the complaint that Hollywood keeps remaking films, rebooting franchises, and pummeling the box office with sequels? How often do we hear a thirst for something new?
Chloé Zhao delivers a new; not a complete deviation from Marvel’s machinations but new enough to challenge them. In tone, her direction serenades us with moments that feel Malickian–concerned with the poetry that a camera can tell and the communities of tendernesses it can capture. But even Terrence Malick’s work (especially of the last 2 decades bar A Hidden Life) doesn’t get high appraisal on movie rating sites. Eternals then, becomes sequestered in a similar cosmos of nicheness, massaging a palatal divide between critic and casual moviegoer but never fully satisfying either.
At the (pandemic era) box office, Eternals is far from lacking and exceeds the worldwide gross of Dune despite being a less recognisable intellectual property. When you consider how moviegoers have been accumulating their investment in Marvel heroes, year in year out, for the last decade, it’s easy to see how releasing something so artistically ambitious with unfamiliar characters to an established fanbase was always going to be an uphill battle.
Guardians of the Galaxy had to weather a similar storm, but Guardians of the Galaxy sets out to be a dysfunctionally and unconventionally fun blockbuster–which it achieves in spades. Eternals however is less intent on being fun and more so invested in being thought-provoking while fun stuff happens on the way. Marching to a beat of the drum that has not been struck, Zhao explores a film that relies on its exchanges of dialogue just as much as it requires energetic gun fingers and gilded laser beams.
And on top of being a more discursive endeavour, the Eternals cast is noticeably diverse in a way that eschews the typical tokenism of diversity. It indulges a distinctly more feminine lens than many of its MCU predecessors–one that is concerned with contemplation and resolution through dialogue as it is with its objectives and ultimatum of violence. It takes conflict seriously. It takes interpersonality seriously. This film is about the character’s bonds, intentions and integrity and the film’s climax is not about triumph through brute force but the victory of transformation. This is, despite the elegantly choreographed fight scenes, a cinematic tapestry of emotionality. And that puts a chink in the hypermasculine format of the superhero, whilst also challenging the overwhelmingly white-male landscape of the genre (and what better example than the film's penultimate scene, where damn near every person of colour beats the cosmic energons out of a white dude?).
If you’re not used to seeing, or not prepared to see, violence rendered a subsidiary by a plethora of nonwhite, nonmale, differently abled characters–then Eternals is a disappointment and a shock. And I suspect that a lot of people (especially the overwhelmingly white male critics) felt let down–because what does it mean that a film with so much to say and so much heart to say it with, that explores the sentimental lives of ten beings over the course of thousands of years and documents their affections, adversities and fractures–can be shrugged off by a New Yorker film critic as “lifeless”? What is more likely is, many didn’t recognise (nor want to recognise) the lives that they’d be cinematically presented with.
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